Harambee International has launched a global video contest to showcase what is right about Africa. The contest is open to professional journalists and to students and will cover everyday topics such as the role of education, the family and sustainability, as well as positive stories of societal integration. The winner in the professional category will have produced a programme that has aired between January 1 and June 30, 2015, and will go home with a prize money of 5,000 Euros, while the winner in the amateur category will win 1,500 Euros.

As Mrs Rossella Miranda of Harambee, from her headquarters in Rome, explains in the video on this page, the story of Africa is more than wars, about disease, poverty or terrorism. This is why the contest organisers want to highlight the dynamic and often unpublished but positive stories from the continent.

Nigerians may know who the winner of the forthcoming presidential election is without having fto rely on government confirmation first. This is because of the many Internet apps that local tech geeks are deploying to help citiizens monitor and report the process. Voters are able to confirm their eligibility as well as monitor vote counts. This promises to mirror and even better the 2011 elections when voters used Twitter to share live votie counts direct from the polling centres.

Some of the citizen-powered websites have information on what to do on election day and how to lodge complaints. Others like "Thumbpower" say "It's a simple thing really, just vote".

The two main contenders are the incumbent Goodluck Jonathan, and the former military dictator General Muhammadu Buhari. It is the closest election the country has witnessed in recent history and seems too close…
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Owning a quality smartphone in Africa a few years ago was something only for the rich and the lucky. Today, at a price of less than 100$, (and thanks to competition, even as low as 70$) and with prices dropping fast, many African consumers no longer see them as an exclusively luxury item.

Over one-third of the continent’s 1.1 billion population owns a mobile phone and it is expected that this year, the smartphone market will grow by over 40% (up from a penetration of 15%), putting 70 million new smartphones in circulation. A recent study by Deloitte (published on February 16) showed that by 2017, an expected 350 million smartphones will be in use. These will be connected to rapidly expanding broad-band infrastructures that are being installed to keep up with the demand, and will go hand in hand with a boom in digital content, internet access and mobile-phone paying services, the…
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Part of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) project for African countries was to ensure that people have access to safe drinking water, and specifically, to reduce the number of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water by half in 2015. Efforts to meet this target have been praiseworthy. However, the main challenge is to turn water access into a resource for sustainable economic development, and not just for domestic use.

Africa will be able to feed itself in the next 15 years. That’s one of the big “bets on the future” that Bill and Melinda Gates have made in their foundation’s latest annual letter. Helped by other breakthroughs in health, mobile banking and education, they argue that the lives of people in poor countries “will improve faster in the next 15 years than at any other time in history”.

Their “bet” is good news for African agriculture: agronomy and its natural twin, agricultural extension, are back on the agenda. If Africa is to feed itself, the women and men who grow its crops need access to technical expertise on how to manage their variable natural resources and limited inputs and market intelligence on what to grow, what to sell and what to keep.

As 2014 grinds gradually to a halt, some good news of startups that rocked Africa is not misplaced. For most techies, software development and entrepreneurship are usually two concepts that find it difficult to mix well in the continent. Some African countries, with Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya in the lead, hold out exceptional hopes for a bright future.

A lot of what people know about Somalia comes from movies or television and very little of this has to do with business or technology; companies merging, new products in the market, the stock exchange etc. Rather we see reports on the latest terrorist activities, millions of refugees fleeing from a never ending war, Oscar nominated films on pirates sailing menacingly along the east coast of Africa, or soldiers held hostage by rebels after their helicopter crashes down. Although these reports, films and programs are based on real life events, they leave us with the impression that Somalia is the last place in African where someone would want to be, and that the events taking place in one square kilometre are representative of the remaining 640,000.

Lagos is becoming one of the world's great mega-cities. Here's an optimistic look at the future of an astonishing development project, Eko-Atlantic, a planned district of Lagos, Nigeria, being constructed on land reclaimed from the Atlantic Ocean.

Wars nowadays are fought by remote control, with drones, missiles and bombers. But the only way to win the war on Ebola is with boots on the ground.

The heroism of grunts who work to exhaustion to save lives ought to be the real focus of media coverage of the epidemic which threatens people Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and even Nigeria.

Of course, scientists in the West are working hard to develop a vaccine for the disease which kills between 50 and 90 percent of its victims. But the only one specifically aimed at Ebola, an American drug called ZMapp, has not even been tested properly on animals.

And there are weighty ethical and social obstacles to distributing it willy-nilly to people with the disease. Although some of the people who have taken it have regained their health, others have died. The World Health Organization has authorised doctors to use the…
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Although a quarter of Kenya’s population are farmers, few of them have ventured into increasing their farm output with the help of loans. For many of them, loans are risky and if unpaid, their only source of livelihood is in danger of being lost to aggressive lenders.

It is no wonder that, sceptical about farm loans, Samuel Kariuki has been struggling to increase his cabbage farm’s output over the last thirty years until his recent discovery of F3 Life, a micro finance company offering “green loans”.

F3 Life offers loans of as little as $20 to as much as $180, as well as free monthly training on how to increase one’s farming business. The program, designed by conservationist Mark Ellis-Jones, offers incentives of lower interest rates and bigger loans to farmers who apply soil and land conservation practices.

Africa is a continent that is big, joyful, generous, enthusiastic and optimistic. Harambee tells its stories: from its love of life and family, to people who have withstood great odds to stories of innovation achieved with limited resources. Our partner is Harambee Africa International, a Rome-based NGO. We want to hear from you. Contact Eugene Ohu, the editor, at harambee@mercatornet.com.